Beer is popular in China, but nowhere is it more popular than in China’s beer capital: Qingdao. Home of the best-known Chinese brewery, Tsingtao, beer here is cheaper than anywhere else, and the locals have devised the perfect method for ensuring a happily intoxicated populace… the street keg.

It’s classic economics. Know what the people want, and provide it to them with a minimum of expense and hassle. In a red-blooded, beer-loving town like Qingdao that means rolling kegs out onto the street at about 9 a.m. and selling the naturally chilled, keg-fresh brew by the kilo. By serving it straight into plastic bags, the cost stays low: a one-kilo bag costs 4 yuan… about 50 cents.

This Mother Theresa of hoppy, malty happiness was pleased to serve us up a couple of frosty kilo bags worth of Tsingtao draft. Note the absence of joyless bureaucrats yelling at her for improperly cordoning off her sales area and not checking our ID.

We got our beer, she got her money, and insisted on a photo to memorialize the event. Note Sudsy smiling his approval… this is the way Sudsy meant it to be.

It’s nice to know, with so many misunderstandings between our two countries, that people here really do know how to speak our language… and I’m not talking about English. OK, back to the beer!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 01:35 by Niedermeyer and is filed under Booze, World.
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Actually, the genius of the bag is that you stick a small straw right through it, and then drink as fast as you can so your arm doesn’t get tired of holding up all of the frothy goodness. It’s cheap, tasty, and effective.

oh wow ted…i wish there was a picture of the woman in the shirt. that is amazing. i was going to ask if you had worn anything else on the trip, but then i saw your blog. its funny…china is more similar to the OC than i thought. i mean they don’t support the free minds or free market, but at least they support the almost free booze, and the freedom to drink it where ever you want. was it hard to drink from the bags? it’s like a cow utter.

Most of Europe allows public drinking but the cheapest thing I could find was a 3 Euro bottle of wine in Paris. It was damn tasty but that works out to around $4.50 US. The Western World must double its efforts when it comes to this sort of thing.

As a matter of fact, last night after the above beer was consumed and we’d walked around the beach for a while, the beer lady yelled at us to sit with her on the street and drink beer with her. After a long half-english, half-mandarin conversation about our families, hometowns and mutual love of beer I was so moved by her friendliness as to present the Sudsy shirt off my back so as to keep a small part of his frothiness here in China’s beer capital. There are few people in the world more qualified to rock the Sudsy than this friendly, beer-lovin’ old lady.

Needless to say she’ll be filling a few water bottles up for the train ride down to Shanghai tomorrow. Also, to answer your question, I do rely on Sudsy to keep away commie bastardliness, but I also just packed light…